Eden Read Online Free Page A

his legs, and pulled himself inside. For a moment his head was still visible; then it disappeared. The others looked at one another.
    "Come on," muttered the Physicist. They followed him reluctantly.
    As they began crawling into the narrow opening, the Engineer said to the Cyberneticist, who was last in line, "Did you notice the smell in the air?"
    "Yes. Strange, pungent… Do you know its composition?"
    "Like Earth's, with something added, I forget what. Nothing harmful. The data are in a small green volume on the second shelf in the—" Then he remembered that he himself had filled the library with soil. "Damn," he said, and squeezed himself through the hole.
    The Cyberneticist, now alone, suddenly felt uneasy. It wasn't fear but an overwhelming sense of being lost, of the strangeness of the landscape. And, too, there was something humiliating, he thought, about returning to the ground like worms. He ducked his head and crawled into the tunnel behind the Engineer.
    The following day, some of the men wanted to carry their rations to the surface and have breakfast there, but the Captain was against this. It would cause, he maintained, unnecessary trouble. So they ate by the light of two lanterns, in the air lock, and drank coffee that had grown cold. Out of the blue, the Cyberneticist said, "Wait a minute. How did we have good air the whole time?"
    The Captain smiled. There was gray stubble on his hollow cheeks.
    "The oxygen cylinders are intact. But purification is a problem: only one of the automatic filters is functioning—the emergency one, on batteries. The electricals, of course, are worthless. In six or seven days we would have begun to suffocate."
    "You knew that?" the Cyberneticist asked slowly. The Captain said nothing.
    "Now what do we do?" asked the Physicist.
    They washed their utensils in a bucket of water, and the Doctor dried them with one of his towels.
    "The atmosphere has oxygen," said the Doctor, tossing his aluminum plate on top of the others. "That means there's life here. What information do we have?"
    "Next to nothing. The space probe took a sample of the atmosphere, that's all."
    "You mean it didn't land?"
    "It didn't land."
    "That's loads of information," said the Cyberneticist. He was trying to clean his face, using alcohol from a small bottle and a piece of cotton. With very little water fit for use, they had not washed for two days. The Physicist examined his face in the polished surface of an air-conditioning unit.
    "It's something," the Captain replied softly. "Had the composition of the air been different—without oxygen—my mistake would have killed all of you."
    "What?" The Cyberneticist almost dropped his cup.
    "And myself as well. We wouldn't have had one chance in a billion. Now we have."
    There was silence.
    "Does the presence of oxygen mean plants and animals?" asked the Engineer.
    "Not necessarily," said the Chemist. "On the Alpha planets of Canis Minor there is oxygen but no plants or animals."
    "What is there, then?"
    "Photoids."
    "Luminescent bacteria?"
    "No, they're not bacteria."
    "It's not important," the Doctor said. He put the utensils and cans of food away. "We have other worries now. We can't activate the defenses—am I right?"
    "We can't even get to them," the Cyberneticist acknowledged. "All the robots came loose from their moorings. We'd need the two-ton hoist to clear away all the scrap, and it's lying at the very bottom."
    "But what do we do for weapons?" asked the Doctor.
    "There are the jectors," said the Cyberneticist.
    "And what are you going to charge them with?"
    "There's no current in the control room? We had current before!"
    "There must have been a short circuit in the accumulator," said the Engineer.
    "Why aren't the jectors already charged?"
    "Orders. We can't carry them charged," the Engineer muttered.
    "Orders! Damn—"
    "Cut it out!"
    Hearing the Captain's voice, the Cyberneticist shrugged in exasperation. The Doctor walked out. The Engineer had taken a